I’m still pissed off about this. Tweetdeck was my favourite Twitter app. It was lightweight, fast and it didn’t have any stupid nonsense like sponsored posts. The only app I get madder about is the death of Google Reader.

Here’s a small confession of mine: I check on several long-dead websites, which I enjoyed way back when, with alarming frequency, even though I’m almost entirely sure that they will never update ever again.

The problem is that many people don’t seem to leave goodbye posts. It’s just business as usual, until things stop abruptly. There’s so many webcomics, that I used to follow that just stopped in the middle of a storyline without explanation. I’m pretty sure that these people didn’t die suddenly, but I guess in a way part of them did. One day they just stopped, writing, drawing, singing etc. and never started up again.

Or maybe they just got tired of sharing their talents with the internet. I can understand that. The internet is stupid.

Maybe they found a more productive use of their time.

In any case, there’s always this hope inside me. They didn’t really give up. They’re just in hibernation. They’re lying in wait. They’ll be back and they’ll be better. Otherwise, why would they keep paying for their domain names and hosting? Huh? I’ll keep checking. One day my faith will be rewarded with more of what I used to enjoy. I’m greedy, I guess.

The internet is littered with the corpses of a billion dead projects and once in a while I like to prod them with a stick to see if they twitch. (Ick.)

So I was Googling myself (shameful, I know) and a lot of the main keywords that I thought my website would rank highly actually had scrapers that had stolen my content as the top result.

This is the wrong kind of scraper.

Don’t know what a “scraper” is? Well, it’s basically an automated website that copies wholesale the content from other webpages. In my case, they probably copy my stuff directly from my RSS feed as soon as it updates.

What disturbs me is how often these types of sites are showing up as the top result in search results. Either Google‘s algorithm has gone janky, or lots of people are linking to these websites. If people are linking to them a lot, I blame those damn tumblr and Pinterest bookmarklets, because they’ve made it so that people don’t even think before they link to a bad source. People just share content that they like and they don’t ever think about the people who created it.

Seriously, I was trying to better myself by learning something new, and I know a lot of guitar nerds, but no one could give me a good recommendation for an awesome double guitar. Sometimes I doubt the rock credentials of some of these people. JEEZ.